So far, there have been research groups and companies who demonstrated how their robots can function in sync. However, influence from various parameters and events in real world applications do affect robots. A group of researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA, developed an approach able to partially handle these problems by… »

Although it was originally released in 2005 as a robot meant for entertainment, the first time we wrote about little robot NAO was in 2009 in our article about 2009 RoboCup. Aldebaran Robotics recently surprised us and released a new and improved version of the NAO robot they dubbed NAO Next Gen. NAO Next Gen… »

A group of developers from the Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is developing a robot capable to tell jokes. Before you skip this article thinking of insignificance of such robots in the future, you might need to know the developers plan to develop more effective personalities for everyday human robot interaction, help machines understand charisma and… »

By using information about specific ethical dilemmas supplied to them by ethicists, computers can effectively “learn” ethical principles in a process called machine learning. A team of researchers programmed Nao robot (toddler-sized robot we wrote about in our article about RoboCup 2009) with an ethical principle that was discovered by a computer. This learned principle… »

The RoboCup is a fascinating combination of innovative research and one of the world’s most popular team sports – soccer. Standard Platform League is a league in which all teams use the same robot platform (Aldebaran’s Nao humanoid robot we described in the last year’s article about RoboCup 2009) so the teams are challenged to… »